Javascript in particular? Yes, it's less likely to force a jump. It has to stay compatible with the web as it exists today and has existed for the last 20 years

Javascript in particular? Yes, it's less likely to force a jump. It has to stay compatible with the web as it exists today and has existed for the last 20 years. Idiomatic JS will certainly change, but that doesn't force old code to change. Ruby and Go live on the server side, so do not have nearly as harsh a backwards compatibility constraint. Come to think of it, I wonder if JS's backcompat story is precisely what has resulted in the intense rate of churn in the libraries and frameworks written in it. Maybe if the language forced periodic change, then that would both reduce the frameworks' evolutionary pressure to change, and increase frameworks' evolutionary pressure to paper over JS's changes. As it is now, the architecture seems to be that you have an unchanging language layer so you put all of the change into the next layer up. (Well, that and the client-side delivery and execution means that framework updates are far far easier than with any server-side language/framework.)